One or more aspects of the present invention relate to network management, and in particular, to managing a network connection of a switch.
The explosive growth of all kinds of information in the networked electronic commerce brings a great challenge to a data center providing services. Accordingly, the data center sees an ever-increasing size and a more complex network. In order to allow the data center network to be easily managed, maintained and even extended, host-mode connectivity is gradually becoming one of the dominant data center network solutions. In this mode, the data center network presents itself to users as an end host system to remove network complexity.
FIG. 1 shows a structure chart of a typical data center network. FIG. 1 shows three physical platforms comprised in the data center network, such as, for example, servers 1, 2, 3. At the lowest level of each physical platform, a virtual machine hypervisor runs; based on the hypervisor, one or more virtual machines may be installed as needed. These virtual machines, like factual and independent end hosts, run in parallel, independently and separately from each other, providing applications and services. Naturally, a physical platform may be served as an end host directly. In a typical network connection structure, the end hosts, including virtual machines, are connected to an (Ethernet) switch, and further to the upstream network via the switch. In particular, the switch has some terminal ports on one side, such as ports 1, 2, 3 shown in FIG. 1, for connecting the end hosts; on the other side, it has link ports for uplinks, such as ports A and B, and data from end hosts are transmitted via the uplinks to the upstream network, such as an upstream switch or upstream internet. Generally, according to a predetermined way, such as a host's MAC address, the switch divides the connected end hosts into Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN), and manages the network connection of terminal devices by taking VLAN as a unit. In the example of FIG. 1, the virtual machines from three physical platforms are separately divided into three groups of VLAN, and accordingly connected to three terminal ports, and then connected to the upstream network via uplinks A, B.
In order to ensure the stability of the data center network, usually it is necessary to provide the network with redundancy, for example, by providing a standby and redundant uplink. According to the existing hot-link solution, the data center network is provided with redundant dual uplinks, in which one uplink is in active status or working status and the other uplink is in passive status or standby status. For example, the uplink A as shown in FIG. 1 may be set as active status, and the uplink B may be set as passive status. In the case of a failure in the uplink of active status, the other uplink, originally in standby status, will be enabled. In this solution, however, there is always one uplink which is in standby status, and thus it is a waste for the uplink resources.
On the other hand, in the case of enabling multiple uplinks, it is prone to form a loop in the switch. As known by those skilled in the art, in a switched network, when a switch receives a data frame with an unknown destination address, the switch will broadcast the data frame. Thus, in a switched network with physical loops, a two-way broadcast ring, or even a broadcast storm, will happen, resulting in downtime due to the depletion of the switch resources. Therefore, the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) has been proposed to resolve the problem. However, the execution of STP still increases the complexity of the network.
In addition, in the prior art, other solutions have been proposed to provide dual uplinks in active status, such as the virtual Port Channel (vPC) solution, the virtual Link Aggregation Group (vLAG) solution, and the like. Among these solutions, however, the vPC solution and the vLAG solution require that the upstream network should be a counterpart network supporting vPC or vLAG, such that the user's existing network has to be modified. For all the above mentioned existing solutions, it is difficult to be implemented in the existing network structure.